Vintage Addis Ababa, The Piggy Bank of The Olden Times

“A good snapshot stops a moment from running away” 

-Eudora Welty

Time does exist, I believe photography is one form of art which brings back recollections of times we thought we’ve moved past by, basically, a piggy bank of a series of presences. It’s simple, bring out an old album and take a seat by your parents’ side, look at how  their faces change in a spur of a moment as they go through the pictures, look how they talk about that day as if it happened a day before even though in reality, it took place some 30 years ago. Going through vintage photographs can be a voyage of seeing afresh. We sometimes come across old pictures and wonder about the story behind it. Well, we might not need to wonder for long thanks to Wongel Abebe, Philipp Schütz andNafkot Gebeyehu who felt incited to come up with this platform “Vintage AddisAbaba” that would introduce us all to the ancestor of our present day we allshare. 

“Vintage Addis Ababa is a crowd-sourced digital archive that gathers old photographs from private collections to create visual memories of the city’s past. By preserving photographs from locals, the project aims to tell the stories of everyday people from the past, people that are not mentioned in history books.”

With a motto “Recollection of everyday people”, the platform allowed the crowed to tell a story alongside the team through contributions. After having shared such stories on the website, Vintage Addis Ababa finallybrought together all in a form of a book they have been collecting for quite awhile. The book consists of 225 pages in total, all full color on premiumuncoated paper and sewn-bound in a hard-cover with textile cover for1000ETB. 

On 17 November 2018, everyone who’s been part of the projectas well as others who’ve been following up on the process gathered at AllianceEthio-Franca is to celebrate the book launch and exhibition followed by a paneldiscussion the team put together. The event was a great way of telling a storyin a whole other way that narrows down a generation of time that separates usall. 

For more detail on Vintage Addis Ababa visit: http://www.vintageaddis.com/

Addis Insight congratulates the Vintage Addis Ababa team for the prolific launch